JANUARY 2008 GALACTIC PROFILE

When I last attempted a comprehensive Black Hole biography of George W. Bush, in January 2003, there was much less data on just how devastating his role on the world stage could be, and there was still hope that he would be a one-term wonder. (Read the 2003 article here.) Half a decade later, as we enter what is thankfully the final year of his administration, there is unfortunately much more to relate, but we can take comfort in the fact that, unlike the situation in Iraq, there actually is a light at the end of this wormhole tunnel.

If we think of the man as the administration, and the administration as the current face of the country, looking at Bush’s natal chart can provide illuminating clues to the way others see us, and the ways in which the American national psyche has been altered over the course of the past seven years. This leader-as-country equation is even more effective with George W. Bush, whose natal Sun at 13 Cancer mirrors the USA’s own, making him a more than usually potent influence on the nation’s direction. Additionally, Bush’s Sun exactly squares a Black Hole at 13 Libra, conjunct the USA Saturn, representative of the presidency. For all his faults, astrologically he is a perfect fit for the job of the nation’s chief executive.

With his Sun in square to a Black Hole, Bush evinces many of the typical traits of this combination, but to a lesser degree than a conjunction would evoke. Black Hole Sun natives are chameleon-like, able to adopt a persona and adapt to circumstances in order to gain the most advantage from a given situation. Thus, despite his Yankee roots and Ivy League education, Bush was very adept at promoting a folksy, regular guy West Texan persona which others found appealing, and which brought him almost enough votes to legitimately win the 2000 election. Similarly, the initially unpopular Bush was able to capitalize on 9/11 to boost his popularity to historic highs. But the square’s ability to maintain a facade is not as advanced as the conjunction’s, and to paraphrase Lincoln, though once he fooled all of the people some of the time, Bush is now capable of fooling only about a third of the electorate all of the time.

However, born 6 July 1946 at 7:26 AM EDT in New Haven, Connecticut, it becomes apparent that the leading factor in the nativity is not the Sun, but a potent conjunction of Mercury and Pluto at 9 and 10 Leo, themselves conjoined the 7 Leo ascendant. Mercury/Pluto is a difficult pairing at the best of times, tending to secretiveness, misdirection, a manipulative use of language, and an innate understanding of communication as power. In Bush’s case, this is exacerbated by Mercury’s exact conjunction with a Black Hole at 9 Leo, which thus affects both the ascendant and Pluto as well. Black Holes act as sources of energy attraction and energy drain, and promote bizarre, reality-altering manifestations, sudden disruptions in the status quo, and radical transformations. They can act as doorways between realities, catalysts for change, and a focus for others’ projections.

Having a Black Hole tied to Mercury/Pluto considerably ramps up the secrecy factor already inherent in the combination, which can be seen quite clearly in the near-obsessive refusal of the administration to release any documents, answer any questions, or allow staffers to testify before Congress, even under subpoena. The history of this sort of behavior by this White House stretches from Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force meetings in early 2001 right through the US attorney firings scandal and into the present. The White House Press Secretary’s job has basically become one of stating “we can’t comment on ongoing investigations” in response to the latest scandal. Not content with cloaking current activities with a secrecy inappropriate to a democratic, open government, the administration has actually gone back and reclassified previously released documents from prior administrations.

Black Hole Mercury tends toward a form of lying which is particularly insidious, in that the native who owns one often does not think of what he is doing as lying. Rather, he is expressing reality as he sees it, from the altered perspective of his confines within the Black Hole, and the parallel realities that opens him to. This may or may not be based on objective facts in the real world we all inhabit, but regardless, it is what the native experiences as reality. Massaging or cherry-picking data to conform to a preconceived worldview or support an already decided upon policy comes naturally to this type, who excels at denying inconvenient facts and revisioning and repackaging conflicting information until it becomes recycled as a supporting argument.

The recent fracas about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program is a case in point. After years of promoting a jingoistic view that conflict with Iran was inevitable, the administration was presented with a report (signed off on by 16 intelligence agencies) stating that Iran posed no nuclear threat whatsoever, and had suspended their weapons program in 2003. At first the administration tried to stifle the report completely, with Dick Cheney butting heads in the intelligence community and delaying the report’s release by sending agents running after red herrings which supposedly “proved” their facts to be wrong. When some in the CIA threatened to leak the report after its release had been delayed for almost a year, the administration gave in, but made lemonade out of lemons by claiming that the report, which explicitly exonerates Iran’s culpability in any current nuclear weapons program, confirms their intent to develop nuclear weaponry, and underscores just what a dire threat they are.

This type of bizarre double-speak is typical of Black Hole Mercury when brought up against a wall of reality which does not support its agenda. This pattern of twisting data and intelligence to fit policy goals can be traced throughout the entire administration, whether it be the flawed intelligence about WMD which led us into Iraq, the purposeful downplaying of the true costs of the Medicare drug benefit, or the imminence of the fiscal crisis in social security.

For Bush personally, Black Hole Mercury has manifested as a literal twisting of the language, in the incredibly poor speaking style he displays. Malapropisms abound, sentences lack grammatic structure, and speeches are punctuated with an endless stream of "ums" and "uhs." Although Black Hole Mercury can be a persuasive speaker, with powerful, compelling rhetoric (as witness Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, and FDR, all of whom owned one), it can also manifest as difficulty with expressing onself (in addition to being a master orator, Churchill stuttered), or feeling unheard by others, as the supergravity of the Black Hole traps the message within its event horizon. That quality of being unheard goes both ways, and Bush is infamous for his inability to incorporate viewpoints differing from his own.

But whatever Bush’s personal communication failings, in its early days the administration was quite persuasive in its rhetoric, until the debacle of the Iraq War became obvious, and scandals became a daily event, completely eroding its credibility with the public. The administration's ability to manipulate the tragic events of September 11, using them to promote a domestic agenda curtailing freedoms and a foreign policy of aggression, and the initial overwhelming support for the invasion of Iraq show just how strongly persuasive they can be. Think about it—we as a collective bowed to restrictions on our rights and approved major military conflict, essentially just on their say-so.

Black Hole Mercury processes data differently from the norm, and can lead to educational difficulties, especially in primary education. Although the memory can be retentive, often these individuals do not test well, and have problems regurgitating knowledge onto paper at command. Bush’s unimpressive academic performance, squeaking through a business degree at Harvard with a gentleman’s C, squares well with this type of Black Hole Mercury manifestation.

Also endemic to Black Hole Mercury is an understanding of the interplay of language and power, and the uses of language to completely misrepresent reality. Thus, in 2000 Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative,” an oxymoronic descriptor having no meaning whatsoever, but sounding both fuzzy and responsible. Once in power, the administration’s political philosophy has been to promote wedge issues which divided the electorate, winning razor thin margins of victory and then attempting to govern as from a landslide endorsement. Additional examples of empty rhetoric which has a nice ring are “No Child Left Behind,” the education policy which prevents teachers from giving customized instruction, forcing them to teach to tests which leave many children behind; the “Clear Skies Initiative,” which allows polluters to release greater levels of toxins into the atmosphere; and the Orwellian-sounding “Office of Faith Based Initiatives,” which operates as a sort of publically funded slush fund to reward evangelical groups whose political support has been vital to the administration.

Manipulation of the media is another hallmark of Black Hole Mercury, especially when paired with Pluto. From Armstrong Williams, the journalist whom the administration paid to write stores endorsing their policies, to the outrageous distortions of the military stories of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman, to questions planted at White House press conferences by prostitute reporters, to bogus press conferences at FEMA where staffers posed softball questions to their bosses, the pattern of media manipulation is unmistakable.

In its nativity the US sports an opposition from Mercury to Pluto, creating an adversarial relationship where the press illumines what is hidden, and speaks truth to power. This has served the American people well, and maintained the Founders’ vision of a free press and an educated, informed public. Conversely, the conjunction of these two planets in Bush’s natal chart clearly indicates a coming together of these two forces, a union of the media (Mercury) and large corporations (Pluto) which began under the Clinton administration, but which has now emerged full-blown as the major threat to our democracy. News has become infotainment, stories which challenge the status quo or threaten corporate profits are sidelined, and from a plethora of voices and choices, Americans are now reduced to a mere handful of media outlets, all spouting the official story.

Bush’s Black Hole Mercury/Pluto conjunction can also be seen in the issues of domestic spying which have riddled the administration. As more details have been revealed over years, a truly staggering picture of unconstitutional activity has emerged, vast invasions of privacy all justified by a need to protect national security. Apparently, for our own safety, our movements, purchases, choices of reading material, private conversations and emails need to be closely monitored by the government. And yet, cargo imports remain uninspected, power plants and chemical facilities unguarded, first responders woefully underfunded. Recently, agents of the Government Accountability Office had no trouble whatsoever in smuggling bomb components onto planes, despite the tens of billions budgeted annually for the newly created Office of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration. Make no mistake—the administration’s spying policies have nothing to do with our safety, and everything to do with their control.

But perhaps the most long-term damage Bush’s Black Hole Mercury has done to the country and our political system has been the subversion of the electoral process via electronic voting. In 2000, with Al Gore ahead nationally by almost a half million votes, everything came down to Florida, and then the Supreme Court. Ballot irregularities in a state run by the Republican candidate’s brother threw the elections into the courts, and eventually to the US Supreme Court, where by a vote of 5-4 conservative justices, several appointed by the Republican candidate’s father or his boss, confirmed Bush’s “victory.” The first news outlet to prematurely call this win, thus giving Bush the early presumption of victory in a contest that was actually far too close to call, was Fox News, run by Bush’s cousin, John Ellis.

After the drama of the disputed election had faded, Republicans in Congress pushed for more modern solutions to America’s voting problem. The rationale used to impose the new, super-alterable electronic voting systems was as impeccable as it was cynical—citing the controversy evoked by hanging chads and misprinted paper ballots in Florida in 2000, the administration was empowered to replace these cumbersome but transparent voting methods with ones that were easily manipulated, designed by staunch supporters of the GOP. Having pulled off such a blatant and partisan coup with barely a whimper from the American public, the administration was emboldened to hack the vote in key states such as South Carolina in the 2002 mid-term elections, thus increasing Republican margins in the House and gaining control of the Senate.

When this second round of theft also went unanswered, and largely unobserved, the tactic was taken to a national level for Bush’s “re-election” in 2004. Methods of disenfranchisement of minority voters pioneered in Florida in 2000 were allied to the high-tech shenanigans introduced in 2002, and targeted to key battleground states across the country, most notably Ohio. By seeming magic, a 3% Bush loss predicted by national exit polls on Election Day was transformed into a 3% victory.

Even in 2006, when the anti-Republican tide was too strong for the typical half-measures of voter disenfranchisement to stem, there is evidence that up to a dozen additional seats in the House and one in the Senate should have gone to Democrats, but were lost to e-vote fraud.

Although staggering in its outlines, the chronicle above barely scratches the surface of the multitude of manifestations wrought by Bush’s Black Hole Mercury. In part 2 we will deal with the effects of Bush’s Black Hole Mars and Saturn in foreign policy and the office of the presidency, and the cumulative effect on the nation’s finances of having each of the money planets of Venus, Jupiter and Pluto allied with Black Holes.

Alex Miller-Mignone is a professional writer and astrologer, author of The Black Hole Book and The Urban Wicca, former editor of "The Galactic Calendar," and past president of The Philadelphia Astrological Society.

His pioneering work with Black Holes in astrological interpretation began in 1991, when his progressed Sun unwittingly fell into one. Alex can be reached for comment or services at Alixilamirorim@aol.com.